Why is 'w' pronounced 'double u' rather than 'double v'?

The "W" used to be drawn or written if you will as a double U instead of a double V, so it had rounded bottoms and curved sides. I believe that it was when the monarchy started drawing them as double V's then it all switched but the name stayed the same.

I don't know. It makes sense for me since I write it like 'double u'.

I actually don't know. I was always wondering this. But in my country you pronounce it different.

In dutch you say. wee.

That is a good question.

well cuz double ' v ' would be weird, try saying it. ' double veee ' dont ' double uu ' sound better?

It can be drawn as a double u! That's how I make it! It looks a lot better than the double v, at least I think so.

Because the panda said so.

Because it's English. America didn't make it. Neither did Germany nor Canada.

Because cursive, which was the original way to write in English, uses what truly looks like two U's put together.

I was actually wondering about this just now! I guess you beat me to it then. xD

I dunno... Maybe because it looks like there's two U's in a W... But then again, same rule aplies for V.

Because the English language is a bastard language.

In Spanish, "W" is pronounced "double V" the spanish sound for "V" is "ve" and "W" is pronounced "duble ve"

Cuz we as americans are psychopaths, even our language is screwed up, just like everyone else's

Its life
Idk

This comes from latin . The status of "u" and "v" is confused because in Roman time, you can notice they wrote the letter "u" as a "v" ( and the "j" as a "i" ). Julius was written this way in Roman manuscripts : " i vl i vs".
The sound "v" didn't exist in Latin . In Middle-Age it appeared, and the latin letter was used for it, while the sound "u" needed another writing, this time taken from the Greek " upsilon" . Therefore European peoples had the choice to call the newly born letter" w " as " double u " or " double v " .
The confusing saga of "u" and "v" is not complete . The lowercase Greek letter upsilon was written like a "u" OK, but the uppercase of upsilon is this : "Y" . It happened that European barbarians made another confusion, this time between upsilon and a sound "i" . In French, the letter "Y" is called "igrec",, which means " greek i ".
And the poor letter "v" is not clear either, since in Spanish it's pronounced "b" .

All this means that when northern Barbarians arrived around here they were not very much intellectual .
Source(s):
Eight languages speaker, including Greek and Latin, and the primitive idiom they call a language across the channel .